Interim Texas Congressional Maps Likely to Remain in Place

By Steven Shepard  //  August 30, 2012 | 2:59 p.m.

The federal district court that drew the interim maps under which Texas congressional and state legislative candidates will seek office this November announced Thursday that those districts will likely remain unchanged for the 2012 elections, despite a federal court ruling earlier this week that the state legislature's maps -- on which those interim districts were based -- did not comply with federal law.

The U.S. District Court in San Antonio granted petitioners a status meeting for Friday on the case, according to a copy of the order posted on the website txredistricting.org. But U.S. District Court judge Orlando Garcia wrote that the 2012 election "is proceeding and will be conducted in accordance with this court's interim plans."

A separate district court in Washington, D.C. ruled Tuesday that the map drawn by the state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry violated the Voting Rights Act because it was crafted with the purpose -- and had the effect -- of denying minorities proportional representation.

Texas gained four congressional seats during the reapportionment following the 2010 census.

Since then state Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, has said he would seek to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Garcia wrote in granting the motion for the status meeting that he was not inclined to remedy the interim maps until after those appeals are resolved. The Supreme Court earlier this year threw out the San Antonio court's first set of interim maps, ruling that they improperly ignored the state legislature's plans, despite the fact that those plans had not yet been cleared in accordance with the Voting Rights Act.

Abbott reportedly told delegates to the Republican convention Wednesday that he planned to challenge the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that require Texas to pre-clear changes to its election laws in his appeal to the Supreme Court, the Dallas Morning News reported Thursday. Then, on Thursday, Abbott announced that he also intends to appeal a new court ruling that threw out the state's new voter-identification law on the same grounds. Minority groups seeking changes to the interim maps argue that, because the interim maps were based largely on the maps that failed the preclearance test, they should be changed, even though primaries in the state have already been held -- and military and absentee ballots must be shipped out in less than a month. "Over 90 percent of the map is the legislative map, that has been found to be illegal," said Luis Vera, attorney for the League of United Latin American Citizens, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Some have speculated that, if the court chose to alter the map, Texas could hold open primaries on Nov. 6 in all races, with the top two candidates advancing to a runoff election if no one earned a majority of the votes. But that is a longshot: Elections officials say they would not have enough time to prepare for that, given federally-mandated deadlines for military ballots. Garcia asked petitioners that, if they intend to argue against holding the Nov. 6 elections under these maps, they should come to Friday's status meeting "prepared to present statutory or caselaw in support of any such argument."

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